Washington at Work; The Senator Pursues 'Untold' M.I.A. Story

By BARBARA CROSSETTE,

Published: August 10, 1992

Correction Appended

WASHINGTON, Aug. 8—
Senator John F. Kerry remembers well the advice he got a year ago when he was considering whether to lead a new investigation into the fate of prisoners of war and other Americans who never came home from Vietnam.

"Everybody on my staff, everybody I knew thought I was crazy, and said, 'Don't do this,' " he recalls. "They said it's a no-win tar baby."

But Senator Kerry, a 48-year-old Massachusetts Democrat, a Vietnam veteran and former prosecutor, had a hunch that there might be a dispassionate, credible way to strip this issue of much of its controversy by marshaling two decades of public and secret documents. He dug deep into his own past and knew he couldn't walk away.

"This is a fascinating untold story, an incredible story," he said. "This thing has consumed American politics for 20 years." Exposed B.C.C.I. Scandal

The junior Senator and former Lieutenant Governor from Massachusetts, who began his Congressional career in the shadow of the state's more famous son, Edward M. Kennedy, was sometimes criticized by colleagues for being an opportunist with little depth in any major national issue. But he has recently acquired a reputation for taking on cases other legislators shrank from tackling when he began exposing the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, while government officials were playing down the importance of the scandal.

Last August, the Senator became chairman of the Senate Select Committee on P.O.W.-M.I.A. Affairs, and began a journey through the labyrinth of fact and fiction on which a powerful grass-roots crusade has been constructed.

He says he does not want to draw any conclusions on any aspect of the issue while his committee is taking testimony and its final report is still months away. But in hearings last week on the most contentious aspect of the missing story -- the unsubstantiated but persistent reports of Americans seen alive in Indochina since the war -- Mr. Kerry said the public should exercise caution.

"The sheer number of live-sighting reports -- more than 1,500 since the end of the war -- indicates to some that Americans, perhaps hundreds, must have been left behind," he said. Not Drawing Conclusions Yet

"However, our failure over 20 years to locate any of those Americans has caused others to conclude that the reports must be false," he added, reflecting the opinion of most officials who have dealt with this issue. "We are not going to draw conclusions until this process is complete."

A day later, he alluded to the possibility that relatives will never believe that no Americans are alive in Indochina as long as the Defense Department officials charged with investigating live-sighting reports cannot go immediately to the sites. Americans are barred entirely from some areas in Vietnam and Laos where people have reported seeing Caucasians.

"You guys," he remarked to a panel of high-ranking Defense intelligence agents who had been testifying for two days, "are caught in the worst Catch-22 craziness in all of history."

Mr. Kerry is nevertheless convinced that a thorough investigation of the issue is necessary "if we are going to move on beyond Vietnam." Other investigations never satisfied those charging cover-ups, like the family members who heckled President Bush at an appearance before their annual convention on July 24.

The Senator's investigation also has its share of critics, some of them on the committee staff, which has been shaken by squabbles between Mr. Kerry's aides and those of the committee's deputy chairman, Senator Bob Smith, a New Hampshire Republican who is also a Vietnam veteran. Several Smith staff members have lost security clearances and jobs on the committee because of leaked documents.

In public hearings and many hours of closed-door testimony, Mr. Kerry says, he has "established the reality of what we knew in 1973," adding that the most difficult part of the job may be over. In that year, American forces were withdrawn from Vietnam, but not all the prisoners came home as expected, despite assurances to the contrary from the Nixon Administration.

"All of us expected a full accounting," he said. "All of us expected to get every one of the prisoners back. None of us ever anticipated that the government might not follow through on the peace accord."

But the Nixon Administration was caught between an unpopular war and the mushrooming Watergate crisis, and the public did not want to hear any more about Vietnam.

Mr. Kerry's committee has now forced the declassifying of more than a million documents and has elicited admissions from a range of officials who knew that American prisoners of war were thought to be alive but unaccounted for in Vietnam in 1973.

Initially, it was believed that 244 prisoners did not come home. But returning prisoners said 111 of those had died, reducing the list to 133. Because many of these were aviators, there is no specific information about where they disappeared or where they may have last been seen alive. 2,266 Unaccounted For

Mr. Kerry says he would also like the Defense Department to take a more realistic look at the long list of 2,266 names of people still unaccounted for in Indochina, at least half of whom are thought to have died but whose bodies could not be found.

Correction: August 11, 1992, Tuesday A Washington at Work article yesterday about Senator John F. Kerry misidentified his law school in some editions. As an adjoining biographical chart said, it was Boston College Law School.